Writer-turned-director Kaufman delves into minds of characters

Friday

Oct 31, 2008 at 12:01 AMOct 31, 2008 at 5:06 AM

Whoever said genius is born out of frustration must have had Charlie Kaufman in mind. The Oscar-winning writer of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” clearly thrives on the aggravation that comes with struggling to understand the meaning of our existence.

Al Alexander

Whoever said genius is born out of frustration must have had Charlie Kaufman in mind. The Oscar-winning writer of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” clearly thrives on the aggravation that comes with struggling to understand the meaning of our existence.

Thankfully, he’s been blessed with curls thick enough to shield his brain from constantly impacting the proverbial ceiling lodged between himself and the ultimate truth. Still, you sense he understands far more than the mortal man, which explains why the diminutive Long Islander has become a guru of sorts for people who see cinema as something far more reaching than entertainment.

As you’d expect from a mind capable of coming up with ideas as intriguing as taking a 15-minute excursion through John Malkovich’s brain, Kaufman is strikingly intelligent and effusive.

Yet you can relate to him with ease almost unheard of among Hollywood types, as I pleasantly discovered recently when Kaufman flew into Boston to promote his latest labyrinthine flick, “Synecdoche, New York,” which opens Friday.

Note: it’s not “Schenectady,” but “Synecdoche,” a word meaning a part representing the whole, like “ivories” instead of “piano.” In this case, the “part” is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s existentially obsessed playwright Caden Cotard, and the “whole” is life itself.

In many ways, it’s typical Kaufman, a hazy mix of fantasy, reality and surreal imagery. But in many ways it’s unique, particularly the depth of feelings it generates, as it forces you to confront your own mortality, which isn’t necessarily a pleasant experience.

Me, I felt almost suicidal after seeing it. Which might explain why Kaufman likes to classify “Synecdoche” as a horror movie.

“I wanted to write about things that were scary,” Kaufman said during our sit-down. “Traditional horror movie stuff isn’t really scary to me. It seems fake scary, which I think is part of why horror movies are appealing to people, because they aren’t real. But dying, illness and the passage of time are real and they’re scary.”

You won’t get an argument on that from Caden, a character who over the course of the movie ages 50 years, enduring numerous heartbreaks, professional lulls and increasing bouts of anxiety brought on by failure and regret.

Like he did with Jim Carrey in “Spotless Mind” and John Cusack in “Being John Malkovich,” Kaufman again takes you inside the human brain to traipse around amid all the lingering psychoses and tangled perspectives. Any college professor will tell you it’s the roots of existentialism, but Kaufman is quick to divert any attempts to label him with the “E” word.

“I don’t think of myself as an existentialist or any ‘ist,”' said the 49-year-old filmmaker. “I’m just trying to explore things personally. I don’t explore them through reading philosophy or subscribing to it. I just think about things in my life and things in other people’s lives and try to determine what it is that fascinates me.”

Or, as I said earlier, frustrates him. You sense Kaufman’s hunger to seek and know in his every word. But you also hear the angst that goes along with it, especially when the subject turns to his experiences as a first-time director on “Synecdoche.”

“It was the longest 45 days of my life,” Kaufman said of the film’s tight shooting schedule. “It’s an enormous managerial position. And it was required that I be a manager, which means I had to be an adult. And I haven’t really had to do that as a writer. I could be kind of moody and petulant and sulky – all that stuff I prefer. But in retrospect I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the control and I like working with actors a lot. That’s fun for me.”

Acting, of course, is what originally drew Kaufman to the Hub back in the 1970s when he enrolled in Boston University’s theatrical arts program. But it was during that time that Kaufman said he had an epiphany.

“I decided toward the end of freshman year that I didn’t want to act anymore,” he said of his decision to pursue writing and directing. “I started to feel embarrassed about wanting to be an actor. I think it was because I was a teenager going through a lot of other self-conscious issues.”

The decision was not easy or certain, he said.

“When I was thinking about quitting, I approached my acting teacher and told him that I was going to leave, and in the back of my head I was sort of hoping that he would tell me, ‘No, no, you can’t leave, you’re too important to the theater.’ I think I really still wanted to be an actor but I just couldn’t admit it to myself. But he said, ‘No, it’s a good idea’ to leave.”

It would not be the last time he turned frustration into success. Exhibit A is “Adaptation,” a movie about a blocked writer and his sellout twin (both of them versions of himself) that earned Kaufman an Academy Award nomination and an Oscar for star Chris Cooper.

“I don’t know what to say about Chris Cooper’s performance except that he was amazing,” Kaufman said. “It’s a beautiful performance. I remember Spike (the film’s director Spike Jonze) saying to me, ‘You know Chris is just an actor who can’t do anything that isn’t true.’ He’s incapable of being dishonest.

“I was just in Spain and they did a little tribute to my work and there was a compilation montage and I saw a piece of Chris in “Adaptation” that I hadn’t seen in a very long time, and I was like, ‘Man, he just made that thing alive.”'

Don’t, however, expect Kaufman to be as generous with the accolades when it comes to George Clooney, whom he blames for fatally marring his script for “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.”

“I felt like I had been cut out of the process and I felt like the movie had been changed from my original intent,” Kaufman said of Clooney, who made his directorial debut in telling the story of game show host Chuck Barris and his claims to have been a CIA operative.

“I really didn’t want the movie to be ‘game show host by day, assassin by night,’ which is what Clooney was more interested in. I really wanted it to be about the interior struggle of this man while keeping the question alive of whether or not his secret life was true. And if it wasn’t true, why did this guy make up this particular fantasy to ... make his life have meaning? I don’t think George Clooney was really attuned to that or interested.”

“Confessions,” it turned out, was one of only two flops on Kaufman’s resume. The other was “Human Nature,” which unlike “Confessions” had a miniscule budget and no big-name stars.

Kaufman, however, will be the first to tell you that good box office and success are mutually exclusive. In fact, he’s not really sure if success is something he strives for.

“I just try to figure out a way to get closer to something that feels truthful,” he said of his scripts. “And that’s sort of enough of a goal for me. I don’t want to top myself in terms of being more of a showman or something like that. I just try to get more honest.”

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